WARKA WATER: THE TREE OF LIFE

THE POWER OF AN IDEA FOR CHANGE

It makes 100 liters of water a day. It’s called Warka Water and it’s a kind of tree that takes away the thirst. It produces water in Ethiopia, a region of the world where drought is widespread and where the serious food crisis hit in 2016, according to ONU report, more than 10 million men, women.

The ONU, for several years now, has put the magnifying glass on the water emergency, stating as ".. to climate change but also rapid population growth, almost half of the world’s population will live in regions with high water stress, including in particular Africa, which will have between 75 and 250 million inhabitants subjected to such pressure"; according to the ONU the world water situation is already worrying as more than one billion and two hundred million people do not have sufficient access to clean water sources and almost another two billion human beings live without toilets.

During a trip to Ethiopia the Arturo Vittori , whose studies focused on energy optimization, aimed at allowing human life in contexts devoid of any resource and, first of all, water, immune to the plague of indifference, was deeply shocked to see women and children walking for miles under the suffocating heat, with the sole aim of procuring drinking water, transported with heavy jerrycans to the villages, in a sort of pagan ritual for survival, which is constantly repeated, day after day, for a lifetime.

A great architect, like the inventors of ancient civilizations, develops the ability to solve problems thanks to the spirit of observation of the surrounding nature, which very often guards the answers to puzzles that seem to the most insuperable, able to be caught only by the most attentive and receptive. developed with Kickstarter and realized directly on the Ethiopian territory thanks to the support of the Italian Cooperation. Then it was a race for improvement.

"From the inspections that we carry out every 2 weeks in Dorze - explained Vittori - and from the numerous interviews we have collected very interesting information, which we used to improve the new versions of Warka Water that we are developing".

The Architect Arturo Vittori, with his collaborator, Andreas Vogler Studio of the Architecture and Vision studio, CEO of the non-profit Warka Water Inc Inc. and founder of the fashion brand Culture à Porte, with the support of the Italian Center of Culture of Addis Ababa and the EiABC (Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction and City Development) decided to put an end to this problem.

The inspiration comes from the observation of nature, there are animals and plants that have developed techniques, strategies, to survive in the most hostile environments. For example, the Namibian desert beetle collects water from the air through the shell, during the night, or cacti that live in the driest areas of the planet."Warka Water Tower", a brilliant idea to solve the problem of drinking water in areas that do not have access to other sources, the result of the experience gained by the architect Vittori in the space field, in the study and design of solutions for the reduction and regeneration of water resources. Warka Water, presented for the first time at the Venice Architecture Biennal in 2012, and aimed at rural populations of developing countries, where infrastructure and sanitation conditions make access to drinking water difficult.

The name Warka chosen for the project, comes from the Ethiopian language and identifies a large fig tree, which in tradition is a symbol of fertility and generosity. At the same time Warka, in the Ethiopian pastoral culture, designates the place of aggregation and education of the community. Unfortunately, to the progressive deforestation of these areas, the disappearance of these trees and their cultural identity seems inevitable . Instead of looking at Western technology, Vittori was inspired by the Warka tree, a giant that challenges gravity with its domed crown.

A tower of life, which owes its forms to the Warka Tree spread in the Ethiopian savannah, a structure about ten meters high, weighing only 60 kilos, which has many innovative aspects and at the same time practical, the functioning of the structure is in fact based on an elementary principle of physics, the condensation of air, which is achieved thanks to the effects of the day/night temperature range, a climatic element that is also very accentuated in Africa.

The materials used are eco-friendly and easily available as bamboo rods, iron wire as connector and polyethylene fabric. Inside the bamboo structure there is a totally recyclable plastic net, which collects water drops directly from the air (thanks to condensation), together with a collector for fog and rainwater. Each pillar consists of two sections: a semi-rigid exoskeleton constructed by tying stalks of bulrush or bamboo together with an internal plastic mesh, reminiscent of orange bags. Nylon and polypropylene fibers serve as a scaffold for condensation, and, like dew droplets, they follow the mesh to a basin at the base of the structure. The use of natural fibers helps the tower to integrate with the landscape both visually and with the environmental context with traditional local techniques.

The tower is also designed to be easily built with simple tools and maintained by the locals, without the need for scaffolding or power tools. It consists of 5 modules that can be installed from bottom to top by 4 people without the need for scaffolding.Thanks to its lightness the system must be fixed to the ground.

The Warka Water Tower is a simple idea, which takes advantage of the principle of condensation, is a structure that can be made directly by local people who, once learned the basics for its installation, The European Commission’s Green Paper on the Competitiveness of Enterprises and Enterprises in the Information Society is a good idea. In a year since its installation in the Dorze area, the tower has already produced more than 30 thousand liters of water.

The first pilot project was carried out in May 2015 in Ethiopia by Warka Water inc., a non-profit organization based in the USA, with the support of private donations (crowdfunding) and the Italian Development Cooperation - Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.

The cost of the structure is very low, about 500 dollars, and the assembly very easy, can be built in less than a week with a team of four people and materials available locally and therefore environmentally friendly. The necessary materials are easily available (bamboo rods, iron wire as connector and polyethylene fabric, lianas, wood). High accessibility is an obstacle, since there seems to be no possibility of profit: this discourages possible investors. The solution was to rely on the network, through crowdfunding.

"Turning air into water is a process that has nothing special. Common dehumidifiers that we all have in the house do. In the absence of electricity, in this case the temperature range between day and night is used, as the Egyptians did four thousand years ago" Arch. Arturo Venturi

The Warka Water Tower isn't only provides a fundamental resource for life but also creates a meeting place for the community, with significant economic potential, since the water produced that is not used for feeding (run-off) can be used for a system of micro-irrigation in the modular gardens achievable around the structure; on the other hand, the construction and maintenance of the structure can create work and give a boost to the local economy. Another important benefit for communities is that women and children can invest their time in activities such as education, personal hygiene and other social activities, rather than in the search for water (in Ethiopia they walk every day up to six hours to reach surface ponds and often contaminated). Future developments of the project include the inclusion of a Wi-Fi connection for villages, which would allow various communities to "connect" and receive real-time data on the weather, market prices of crops, etc.

It is a passive structure, it works only thanks to natural phenomena such as gravity, condensation and evaporation. Easy to maintain, it is run independently by the villagers. Design depends on the local environment: weather conditions, geomorphological characteristics of the site, local indigenous culture, natural materials available.